


Pick Your Battles

by Aliana



Series: Do No Harm [8]
Category: Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Anachronistic, Gap Filler, Gen, Gondor, Minas Tirith, Third Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-18
Updated: 2012-03-18
Packaged: 2017-11-02 02:58:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/364254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aliana/pseuds/Aliana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another few hours during the Siege of Gondor. Nicotine, Hemingway, and random acts of kindness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pick Your Battles

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to LiveJournal in summer 2006. A gapfiller to [Fallen](http://archiveofourown.org/works/364151/chapters/591380).

Valacar has been trying to ration out his cigarettes now that the war is on, but fuck if it isn't difficult. After each fresh load of casualties he thinks just one more, scrubs his hands, goes out to the gardens and smokes, comes back, scrubs his hands even harder, returns to work. When he was a kid he used to think he was being cool and aesthetically sound, as if he were a character in a black-and-white film. But now he has no illusions: he turns the pack over and stares at the Warden's official warning label: SMOKING KILLS.

Fíriel used to give him abuse about it. Once when she was a teenager, they were standing on the walls and she asked if she could see the box. He handed it to her, upon which she turned and flung it over the battlements.

"The hell was that? Those aren't cheap." Some shopkeeper on the fifth circle would probably sweep the pack into the gutter. At least if it had been the second or the first it might not have gone to waste.

"Think about how much money you'd save if you quit." She wasn't smiling, but it was still obvious she was pleased with herself, smug little hussy.

"It doesn't matter. You can't just toss other people's things like that."

"What if you found me standing here injecting heroin into my eyeball? I hope you'd take the syringe and throw it as far as you could."

"That's not the same. And if you were a junkie you wouldn't shoot up outdoors in broad daylight. You have more sense than that."

"It's bad for you, Valacar. It's a bad habit. Anyway, you're a surgeon and you should know better."

"You're not one to talk about good habits," he said then. It was a low blow, a terrible thing, and it made him cringe afterward, but he was twenty-two and stupid and such was the extent of his anger.

"Neither are you," she replied, which was also unfortunately true, and he flinched inwardly and then they glared at one another until it became impractical and a waste of time.

Now she's given up on him. They don't bother one another about their smaller vices anymore.

Valacar lights a cigarette and stands contemplating the garden pillar he's standing next to. The city's been looking a bit tatty these days, and not just the lower circles. There's a thin rime of grey dust running down every wall and archway, especially now that the street-cleaners have been evacuated. A whole fleet of street-cleaners and wall-scrubbers, in fact, with their industrial whisk brushes and non-corrosive washing solutions and their smart blue uniforms. All at taxpayers' expense, all because the people in charge don't seem to think Minas Tirith is ageing gracefully. And I'm not helping, he thinks, ashing his cigarette into a potted plant.

He touches the column and holds the smoke in his lungs and thinks about all the men they lost today, the squelch of soft leaking things beneath their hard armour and their calloused skin. Then he tries to think about all the men they saved. Did they really save them, though, or was it simply a not-losing? Or was losing a not-saving? This is something he has always wondered; how much can they actually do? What if there is some greater and even more bloodstained hand at work somewhere, turning knobs and buttons, snipping arteries and suturing gashes? My glass is half full, my glass is half empty. He is so tired; everything is second-guessing and double-negatives and compound words.

He sent Laeron off to bed earlier this afternoon, resisting the urge to tuck the boy in and give him a teddy bear. He was feverish, could barely keep his eyes open, sweat beading up beneath his dark bangs. The last Valacar saw of him, he was curled up with a copy of A Farewell to Arms. Why read a war novel now? He should be reading a gossip magazine, a mystery book, the second half of the dictionary, anything but a war novel.

The noise of the Siege drifts up to the sixth circle and the Houses, and vibrations of the battle-machines grind their way up beneath the feet of the people there. Valacar wonders if Mordor's got machine guns, if Sauron has rolled out the tanks. He doesn't care to ask anyone because he doesn't want to know. He just lets the clues drift towards him in the sounds, in the types of fragments he finds embedded in his patients, in how frightened everyone seems to be at the moment. Somehow he thinks the Enemy would be more stylish in its choice of weapons, would use something more sinister and inventive than pure pragmatic brute force. But what does he know?

Half his cigarette is gone already (half remaining, or half used?). What will he do without Laeron?

He notices one of the girls lying on the grass a short distance away from him. She has her left arm draped across her face, over her eyes, and the fabric of her dress is tented around her body where her knees are bent. She's not asleep; she takes her arm away and rolls over on to her stomach. Valacar goes over to her and taps her gently on the shoulder.

"Hiya, Narrator."

She makes a bleary noise and lifts her head, plucks the white headphones away from her ears. "Oh. Hi, Valacar." She tosses a glance at his cigarette but says nothing.

"Can you do me a big favour?"

She sits up. "Depends on what it is, I guess."

"Can you find Laeron?"

"I suppose I could."

"And bring him a glass of orange juice? And a cup of tea? And what book are you reading right now?"

"I'm not."

"What was the last one you read?"

"I don't."

"Excuse me?"

She glares at him. "If you must know I'm functionally illiterate." She sits up and folds her hands in her lap and Valacar can see traces of pink polish on her fingernails. "I have a very manual sort of job. I'm part of a long-standing oral teaching tradition and a member of the working class. I don't need to read."

"Oh."

She puts her earbud back in and untangles her headphones. She is a wide-eyed slip of a girl, someone you might misplace or lose. "This is Elloth's. She has terrible taste in music."

"Okay. I have another idea, then."

"What?"

"Laeron's ill. You can come and help me today."

"Really? Me?"

"Sure. Have your nap and then come to the surgery."

"Okay." Another rumble filters up from the lower circles. Valacar leaves Narrator to her sleep, and she curls herself inwards on the grass and turns up the volume.

Before he goes back to work he washes his hands, cleaning beneath his fingernails one by one. He brushes his teeth and rinses his mouth twice. The noises from the Siege are growing louder. One of his patients insists on calling him "Doc," over and over, and it is somehow doing more to agitate him than the sounds of impending doom.

"How's it going for you, Doc?" the patient asks as Valacar sews up the gash at the back of his head. "How're you holding up?"

Fine. Fine. The man's hair is matted with blood and dirt. He is calm enough but in his lap he fidgets with a lighter, spinning it in his hands and flicking it on and off, on and off, little sparks of flame between his fingers. Doc: that's a nickname for an old man. Valacar is thirty-seven years old this spring; he has a nicotine habit and a roomful of baggage and he is so tired right now he wants to find a crevice in which to disappear and die, but he is not an old man.

"Hold still, please," he says.

"Sorry, Doc."

"That's all right."

At the next lull he goes outside and lights up again, and this time Fíriel is there, staring out into the smoggy distance.

"Tanks," she murmurs, glancing at him and then looking away again. "Planes, too, maybe."

"Ah."

"Give me that," she says. She takes the cigarette out of his fingers, takes a drag, and gives it back to him.

"Jesus Christ, not you, too."

She breathes out slowly. "I've been in charge of South Ward triage for the past three hours." Whether this is an excuse or an explanation he is not sure.

"What if you were injecting heroin into your eyeball?"

"What?"

"That time when you tossed all of my cigarettes over the battlements. Don't you remember?"

"Oh." She pauses, almost smiles. Smug little hussy. "Yes." She has taken the cloth from her head and tiny bobby pins gleam in her dark hair. Sometimes, at odd moments, he thinks he ought to have married her. They could have had two point five children and a white picket fence. Well, a stone fence, maybe, since wooden fences are probably against the city's building regulations. They could have had a dog and a mortgage and he could have packed her and the kids off to the coast during the evacuations so that he might have had something to be wistful aloud about to the other surgeons.

She half-turns toward him and all those thoughts evaporate, the cinema projector shuts off mid-reel. Obviously he could not have married her.

"Fíriel, do I look like a Doc?"

"Sure. You're a surgeon, aren't you?"

"No, not a doctor. A Doc. Like the nickname, Doc."

"Oh. God, I don't know. Why?"

"One of the men kept calling me that. It bothered me."

The noise of artillery fire comes hammering up close to them.

"You have to pick your battles," Fíriel shrugs.

"Ha, ha."

"I mean it." Somewhere far below them another wall crumbles. She asks to borrow his cigarette once more and then she goes back to the triage.

The newspaper hasn't come out in over two weeks. Or not the proper newspaper, with all of the columns and the sports scores and the crossword puzzle. It's dwindled to a couple of tissue-thin sheets, with lists of the casualties and the missing in tiny print. Valacar had a thought to bring Laeron a copy of the paper, but now he just frowns at it and crumples it in his hand. It comes apart like a thing of little consequence.

When he finds the boy he's still got his nose stuck in the Hemingway novel.

"Hello," Valacar says. "I've brought you some orange juice."

"Thank you," Laeron replies.

"I've also brought you a book about the Gondorian Neo-Surrealist movement. It's quite interesting. And it has good pictures."

"Oh. Uh, thank you."

"In case you wanted to read something different. You know."

"Okay."

"But maybe you should try to get some sleep, now."

"Maybe in a little while." He coughs and mops the sweat from his brow with his shirt sleeve. "Did you know," Laeron begins, "Hemingway said that he didn't ever encounter happiness in intelligent people. Or something like that."

"I don't think he was very happy, himself."

"Do you think that's true?"

"If it is true, then I hope you grow up stupid."

"Okay." Laeron is beginning to nod off, so Valacar just leaves the book and the orange juice on the table beside him. He walks back to the surgery and thinks about it all. Hemingway's not so bad, really. There's the spareness of the language, the long sentences and the rhythms; it's a way of scrubbing the war clean, finding a single thread and pulling it. Even when the thread is made of cigarette ash and gore, it's still a clean thing because it's the one thing at the moment instead of ten thousand other things ringing at once in your ears, a million grains of sand to wear you down moment by moment. Like cleaning the rime away from the walls and the pillars, removing the rubbish from the potted plants. Maybe it makes sense. He is thirty-seven and there's a Siege going on and he's carrying a toothbrush on him.

He hopes that Narrator will be at the surgery already when he comes back. In the wards he sees the soldier whose head he stitched up. He's sitting on a bed, still fidgeting with his lighter, on and off, on and off.

"Hey, Doc," he says when he sees Valacar.

"Hello. How's your head?"

"Doing all right, doing all right. They've broken into the second circle," he throws in as an aside.

"Oh." Valacar pauses, then points at his lighter. "Do you smoke?"

"Yeah, sometimes."

"Here." He pulls his pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and tosses it at the man, who catches it in surprise.

"Whoa. These things are scarce, man. You're sure?"

"They're all yours."

"No way. You're sure?"

"Yeah. Not a problem. Just don't smoke in here. They'll kill you if you smoke in here."

"Whoa, yeah, sure. Absolutely. Thanks, Doc. You're amazing."

"Don't mention it."

Actually, he's regretting it already, but for a change it's a nice kind of regret. He puts his hands in his pockets and walks away, through the darkness and the rumours and the noise, down the corridors and back to work.


End file.
